📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Friday 28 August
At 16:22 on this day in 1943, in Sofia, a man of forty-nine died of heart failure shortly after coming home from a meeting with Hitler. Bulgaria has been arguing about Tsar Boris III ever since, and it is not a museum argument: it is live, it is personal, and if you stay here long enough you will walk into it.
What happened on this day
Boris took the throne in 1918, when his father Ferdinand I abdicated after Bulgaria's defeat in the First World War, and inherited a country about to be stripped by the Treaty of Neuilly in 1919. He sanctioned the coup of 1923 and the coup of 1934, then removed the movement behind the second one and from 1935 ruled as an effective absolute monarch, through prime ministers who largely did as he wished. His war was a balancing act. Bulgaria joined the Axis, let German troops attack Yugoslavia and Greece from its soil, and took Vardar Macedonia, Pirot and Greek Thrace, which is how he acquired the title Цар Обединител (tsar o-be-di-NEE-tel), Tsar Unifier. On 13 December 1941 his government declared war on Britain and the United States. He would not, however, send Bulgarian troops to the Eastern Front.
The other refusal is the one Bulgarians argue hardest about, and both halves of it are true. Boris signed the Law for the Protection of the Nation, which stripped Bulgarian Jews of most of their civil rights and was in substance a copy of Germany's Nuremberg laws. In 1943 the administration of his prime minister Bogdan Filov deported 11,343 Jews from the territories Bulgaria was then administering, and sent them to Treblinka. The Jews of Bulgaria proper were not deported. The Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church intervened, the deputy chairman of parliament Dimitar Peshev wrote his letter, intellectuals and opposition figures pushed, and the king told Berlin he needed the men for public works. Close to 20,000 were expelled to the countryside and into forced labour instead. Both of those things happened under the same crown, in the same year, and any account that gives you only one of them is selling you something.
Then he died, and nobody has ever settled why. The rumour that ran round the world was poison on Hitler's orders, after a last meeting at which Boris would not hand over the Jews or send troops east, though Filov said the argument had only ever been about troops in the Balkans. His son Simeon thought the Soviet secret police at least as likely. His daughter Marie Louise said she was sure it was neither the Nazis nor the British, but the Russians. Goebbels wrote in his diary that Hitler believed the Italian court had done it with snake venom. The German doctors wanted an autopsy and the royal family refused.
Why this matters for British expats
Some of this is directly yours: Bulgaria declared war on Britain within living memory, and when Boris's own daughter listed the people who might have poisoned her father, the British were on the list she was ruling out. The rest is cultural literacy of the most practical kind. You will meet Bulgarians who tell you Boris saved the Jews, and Bulgarians who tell you he deported them, and the honest answer is that the record contains both, which is exactly why the argument never ends. Knowing both halves is the difference between joining that conversation and stopping it dead. As for the man himself, he was buried at Rila Monastery, dug up by the communists in 1944, moved to Vrana Palace and then moved again to somewhere still unknown. When they excavated Vrana after communism fell, the only part of him they found was his heart, kept in a glass cylinder outside the coffin. His widow took it back to Rila Monastery in 1994 and it was buried there again, which is the only part of this story that is finished, and it is worth the detour if you are planning a trip inland.
Sources and further reading
The reign, the wartime record and the deportation figures above are set out on Boris III's Bulgarian Wikipedia entry, which is fuller than you might expect on the parts Bulgarians still dispute. The English entry carries the competing accounts of his death, quoting Filov, Goebbels and the family, and the story of what happened to his body afterwards.